


If Someone Told Our Story

by Watch_Out_For_Bears



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Gen, Slytherin Redemption, the TERF didn't give us what we deserved so here I am doing her job
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-03
Updated: 2020-11-03
Packaged: 2021-03-08 19:40:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,724
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27362116
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Watch_Out_For_Bears/pseuds/Watch_Out_For_Bears
Summary: There are stories told of Harry Potter; his name is chanted by the grateful masses, biographies and picture books and news articles will be published with his photograph on the front page. Molly Weasley will tell anyone who’ll listen about the child who went from Boy Who Lived to hero to champion to Chosen One before her very eyes. Yes, stories are told of Harry Potter.Others slip through the cracks.So here’s the story of the students of Slytherin House - the house of the ambitious, the cunning, and the forgotten.
Comments: 2
Kudos: 10





	If Someone Told Our Story

**Author's Note:**

> Hello! I've been writing for years, but this is my first time actually posting something. Please excuse any formatting errors; I'm still getting used to this site.
> 
> **TW for brief, non-graphic mention of sexual assault and non-graphic violence as well. ******

When they were Sorted, only one table cheered. Pansy Parkinson took her place at the Slytherin table and straightened her back. She did not care to be belittled.

  
Even in her first year, she learned that people did not want to talk to her. Red scoffed, yellow mumbled, blue maintained an even silence. There were outliers, of course - Cedric Diggory nodded in the hallways, Luna Lovegood offered dreamy smiles and vague compliments. But Pansy learned to gather her Slytherin girls close. They built a shield out of each other’s squared shoulders, not a single one of them hiding, generating a force field with sharp smiles and lip gloss. _You can’t touch us, because we are art._ People started calling them “Pansy Parkinson’s gang.” Pansy refuted this title amongst her friends: even at eleven, twelve, thirteen, she knew that when one name was attached to a diverse group, no matter how prestigious the name or powerful the group, it caused more harm than good.

  
They clashed, often, with Draco Malfoy, who seemed determined to antagonize and flatter them all at once. But Draco knew what he was doing. He had observed, throughout his childhood, the way his father demanded respect, inciting fear with little more than a stare. He had also seen the way his mother moved unobserved, wheedling secrets from party guests or politicians, acting on the unspoken rule of pureblood society: those who could make themselves both delicate and strong could do anything they pleased, go anywhere they chose. Draco had not mastered this art himself, too proud to let himself be underestimated, but being in Slytherin meant learning that just because you couldn’t do something yourself, didn’t mean you couldn’t convince others to do it for you.

  
He and Pansy came to an agreement: Draco would give her a useful boost into higher circles (Slytherin House, after all, was merely a microcosm of the greater pureblood world, and the ties you made there could help you throughout your life). Pansy was to assist him in building a reputation for strength and nobility, whether by clinging to his arm like a fool or spreading rumors about his enemies.

  
And she did indeed assist him. Draco built himself an invisible platform, from which he could see and be seen, like the ruler of his own little society. Vincent Crabbe and Gregory Goyle attached themselves to him the way a flobberworm clings to a finger; this, they believed, was their role. (At the start of their very first year, Vincent’s father took him by the shoulders, jerked his head towards where Draco was standing with his father, and said, “You get yourself on his side, boy. He might not be kind, but those Malfoys take care of their own.”)

  
And take care of them he did. Draco might not have had polite words or patience to spend on Vincent Crabbe, but he rose through the ranks of Slytherin House and brought Vincent with him. When he started distancing himself, Vincent and Gregory assumed it was because he was busy with the Death Eaters, and poured their energy into supporting him. When they faced Potter, Granger, and Weasley in the Room of Requirement, Vincent cast Fiendfyre and died confused as to why Draco was so upset. This was the tragedy of Vincent Crabbe: no one told him anything unless they were telling him to do something, and no one learns under those circumstances. Nothing grows under a rock.  
But no one could blame Draco for this failure; after all, he was just mimicking his father, a boy trying to be a king, treating everyone as lesser in an attempt to make himself more, more clever, more regal, more loved.

  
This, in general, didn’t work, except in the special case of Astoria Greengrass. She was two years younger than he, and quiet, and though romance didn’t bloom between them until some time after the Battle of Hogwarts, she saw what others did not, saw a frightened child trying so, so hard to be enough, to satisfy everyone on every side, lost in a charade, blood pure but still so red when Harry Potter sliced his skin open for the sake of an experiment. This was what Slytherins were to the rest: expendable, all the same, clever and cunning, cutout people, paper kids with sharp teeth and no spine.

  
But all it took was one look at Millicent Bulstrode to see that this was an erroneous assumption; she painted her lips red and walked side by side with Pansy Parkinson, towering over everyone else in the hall, and when in her second year she faced Hermione Granger, who even then was not famed for her mercy and compassion, Millicent cast aside her wand and fought like a Muggle. For Granger had curses on her lips and a great, prejudiced mind, and Millicent was not willing to be the vanquished villain, not in that instant. With Hermione in a headlock, she reminded half the school of the Sorting Hat’s words: “Those cunning folk use any means to achieve their ends.” She was not weak. She was not an example. She would sink as low as she had to to defend herself and her kind.

  
Five years later, Amycus Carrow’s hand found its way up Lavender Brown’s skirt, and Millicent punched him in the face. Women, that was her kind; there was a war going on that was larger than the difference between green and red, and Millicent would not discriminate.

  
Theodore Nott was a different case. Blood supremacist and proud, he would claim, parroting his mother, and it was their seventh year when he finally completed a spell he had been working on for months on end. It was a spell to unveil blood purity, and he cast it quietly in the Slytherin Common Room. Draco Malfoy was pure. Pansy Parkinson, pure. Millicent Bulstrode was a half-blood...

  
Theodore never learned whether or not Millicent was even aware of her tainted blood. He simply tore up his notes and set them aflame.

  
Their seventh year was hell, though perhaps not in the same way as it was for the other Houses. They had the Carrow’s grudging respect, but that didn’t make them safe from the curses of bitter Hufflepuffs, the shouts of Gryffindors whose robes dripped liquid red, the terribly accurate taunts of Ravenclaws whose minds were warped by the horrors they had witnessed. Pansy Parkinson lost the tip of her ear to the severing spell of furious Ernie MacMillian; Daphne Greengrass pretended to kiss it better and then burst into tears. Draco Malfoy got thinner and thinner until Vincent began bringing him breakfast each morning. Tracey Davis spent hours with Professor Slughorn, learning the potions she’d need to heal injured third years who hadn’t yet learned to control their mouths. Astoria Greengrass grew up years in the span of months. Blaise Zabini put their life on the line saving first years from torture. While Potter, Granger, and R. Weasley busied themselves with camping, Slytherin students talked Alecto Carrow out of homicidal rage. While Longbottom, G. Weasley, and Lovegood led an army named for a dead man, Slytherins built their own army, calling themselves by their own ancient names. They were part of a fragmented rebellion. They were children who were no longer playing.

  
They were sent away. McGonagall had them evacuated; it was presented as a choice, but there was no question in the way they were marched out of the castle. Members of Dumbledore’s secret society flanked them on either side, looking as though they’d like nothing more than to jinx the life out of the first year who pulled out her wand to retie her shoelaces.

  
Some of them returned to fight anyways, sneaking in through the gaps in crumbling walls and darting across hazy courtyards. Forcing themselves to shed their green robes - when did the color of nature, of renewal, become the mark of something sinister? - they prayed they would not be again mistaken as the enemy by the ones who had painted them as villains from the very start, or else forced to face their own parents in a duel of life or death.

  
Those who did not fight stayed hidden in their homes, waiting, hoping (for what, they did not know). When the sun rose, they pleaded with an imaginary judge, and when their parents didn’t return by noon, they sank to the floor and listened as cheers filled the streets, as victory was announced from every radio, as letters began to arrive: government orders, requiring they appear in court...frightened friends and family begging for news...condolences…

  
They were not considered the victims in this war, though it was they who had been most moved by it, buffeted this way and that by fearful parents, condemnatory teachers, and their own friends. They were erased from the story afterwards: noble Gryffindors wrote autobiographies, Ravenclaws gave speeches, and Hufflepuffs created charities. Slytherins, according to all narratives, had been at the very least complicit in the Carrows’ machinations, and at worst a part of them, bloodthirsty and vicious. People shrank away from them as they walked through Diagon Alley, or else asked if they were looking for “the other alley.” Draco woke up screaming from nightmares and support groups shut their doors in his face. Aurors smashed in Millicent Bulstrode’s front door and raided her flat unprompted. Pansy was fired from her job after refusing to apologize for the actions of her ancestors. The young Slytherins visited their parents in Azkaban and dementors leaned in close, as if they could somehow sense the guilt that had been placed on their shoulders. Peace was difficult to find and even harder to hold.

  
(Pansy started wearing Muggle jeans under her robes. The entire Malfoy family attended Vincent’s funeral. Gregory took a job on the Knight Bus. Millicent kept buying lipstick. Tracey became a Healer and a damn good one at that. Blaise donated their inheritance to the Lupin Foundation and took a job with a Muggle modelling company. Daphne freed her house elf. Theodore devised a spell to cover Dark Marks. Astoria took up gardening. Draco left a flower at Albus Dumbledore’s grave, wore green to the Fallen Fifty’s memorial, and told his son the stories of all the Slytherins who were never allowed to be good).

Fin.


End file.
